Summary: Privacy-Preserving P2P Data Sharing with OneSwarm
Tomas Isdal Michael Piatek Arvind Krishnamurthy Thomas Anderson
University of Washington
ABSTRACT
Privacy--the protection of information from unauthorized disclo-
sure--is increasingly scarce on the Internet. The lack of privacy
is particularly true for popular peer-to-peer data sharing applica-
tions such as BitTorrent where user behavior is easily monitored by
third parties. Anonymizing overlays such as Tor and Freenet can
improve user privacy, but only at a cost of substantially reduced
performance. Most users are caught in the middle, unwilling to
sacrifice either privacy or performance.
In this paper, we explore a new design point in this tradeoff be-
tween privacy and performance. We describe the design and imple-
mentation of a new P2P data sharing protocol, called OneSwarm,
that provides users much better privacy than BitTorrent and much
better performance than Tor or Freenet. A key aspect of the One-
Swarm design is that users have explicit configurable control over
the amount of trust they place in peers and in the sharing model
for their data: the same data can be shared publicly, anonymously,